


Five Times Withnail Sipped Wine from a Webley & Scott

by Who Shot AR (akerwis)



Category: Withnail & I (1986)
Genre: Alcohol, Five Times, Gen, Guns, POV Third Person, Post-Canon, Present Tense, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-13
Updated: 2011-03-13
Packaged: 2017-10-16 22:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/pseuds/Who%20Shot%20AR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Withnail comes home from the park and has a last drink or five.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Withnail Sipped Wine from a Webley & Scott

**Author's Note:**

> My knowledge of guns is hilariously inadequate. Kindly consider anything egregiously wrong the result of an unreliable narrator.

The first time he tries it, he fails. He's tipped his head too far back: the alcohol slips over his tongue and down his throat before he's had half a chance to pull the trigger of the fucking gun.

He pulls the pistol out of his mouth, feeling for the wine bottle as he does, and pours in another slug. It's not really a slug--slugs are whisky--but it's a bloody good pun nonetheless. Is there any whisky in the flat, he wonders briefly, but he's quite certain there isn't, and even if there were, there's no time to look when he's in the middle of offing himself.

Second time goes pear-shaped, too, and he tells himself it's the angle. Maybe he ought to give up on the whole fucking idea and just start drinking his booze from guns all the time. It lends the wine a metallic glint that's got to be fucking impossible to achieve otherwise, unless you plan on tucking fifty pence between your lips every time you fancy a swig.

He's not even really trying, the third time, just wants a drink and likes the sad little mouthful he gets for the trouble. It's a bloody pain, getting the wine into the gun, and the effort doesn't really pay off when he isn't pulling the trigger, but there's still a novelty akin to drinking lighter fluid to the whole fucking thing.

He splashes a substantial amount of wine on his trousers when he refills the gun. It's a fucking shameful waste of the cheapest wine available to mortal man, and now he looks like he's pissed himself. If there's even the slightest fucking justice in the world, and he's quite certain there isn't, it'll dry before anyone finds him.

Fourth time, he thinks he's got the gun tilted to its ideal angle, so the wine can roll down from the barrel along with the bullet, burning the taste of grapes and gunpowder into his mind for the fraction of a second it'll matter.

Fifth time, it turns out he's right.


End file.
